Gothic

Notes

"Silke's idiosyncratic style may be partly attributed to her lack of formal training. Born in Hungary, she lived in Israel from 1950 to 1970 before moving to South Africa. Silke draws on gothic romances and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm to create worlds at once seductive and alluring in their obsessive attention to detail. Her complex, intricate compositions have a nightmarish quality, and are often concerned with exploring the chilling subtexts of children's stories. In this painting lavish lace fabrics and highly detailed and intricate images drawn from fairy-tales float spectrally in Indeterminate space, only to gain a dark focus and edge as they take more concrete form in the lower half of the painting, suggesting infinite layers of horror."¹

^1.Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Works From A Private Collection of Contemporary South African Art on Permanent Loan to The Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, unpaginated.

Literature

Juditha Skinofsky (1989) 'Eris Silke', Cosmopolitan, July 1989, illustrated in colour on page 173.

Michael Stevenson (ed) (2001) Works From A Private Collection of Contemporary South African Art on Permanent Loan to The Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, University of Cape Town, Cape Town: University of Cape Town, illustrated in black and white, unpaginated, cat. no. 38.

Provenance

Die Kunskamer, Cape Town.

Property of a Gentleman.